The general CF and Flex community are invited to attend a Flex presentation tonight broadcasting from the Nashville ColdFusion User Group. We originally planned on doing this presentation in March of this year. Due to technical difficulties it was rescheduled for tonight. Theo Rushin Jr. will be presenting FlexTimer: A Case Study of a Flex RIA. More information can be viewed at the Nashville UG Web site. Barring any technical difficulties the preso will be available via Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional at the following URL: http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/r69585719/. If the recording turns out, I'll post it to Charlie Arehart's UG TV.

Macworld reports (August 24, 2007) several sites/companies lining up with ways to unlock the iPhone this week. Sites such as iPhoneSIMFree.com and Uniquehones plan to begin selling their unlocking software as early as this weekend. Other enthusiasts don't plan on selling their technique. Instead, they are offering up already unlocked iPhones on eBay.

According to Engagdet, the 6-person team from iPhoneSIMFree has successfully unlocked the iPhone so that it can be used with any carrier that supports SIM cards. For information and to see a video of an unlocked iPhone in action, click here.

I'm really interested in fun product/software "hacks" that create more usable, more productive, or generally better stuff. I'm not talking about the blackhat kind of hacks, but more the kind of thing you would find here. One such example is illustrated on this site. The idea of having a writing instrument that performs as well as a $200+ Mont Blanc pen - at a fraction of the cost - is pretty cool. So I followed the instructions on the Web site to see if it really worked. Read on for more.

Any of you running OS X and the Adium chat client may have noticed an incredibly odd issue with Adium crashing each time you attempted to launch it yesterday. Apparently, there were some issues with the way the new version of Adium (1.1) was released. You can read the full account of how the Adium team discovered and fixed the issue - which lends insight into how the team operates - here. It's a good read.

For those of you not "in the know," Ed Sullivan is the man behind the user group program, the Adobe Champion's program and more at Adobe. If it weren't for Ed and his hard work there wouldn't be the 300 plus Adobe user group's in the U.S. today.

Ed's now blogging alongside Jonathan Wall (Ed's boss) over at Jonathan's blog. You can check out his first post here:

Adobe's new Integrated Runtime (AIR) will be released at some point this year (a beta is currently available here). The release of AIR will bring new possibilities in how applications communicate with client machines. Previous to the Adobe Integrated Runtime, Flash applications adhered to a security model that drastically handicapped what your applications could and couldn't do. For more information on the general Flash player security model see this page; for more info on Flash player security and Flex 2.01 see this page. With AIR, all of the following are now possible:

The ability to:

create files and directories

list the contents of directories

copy and move files and directories

read and write text and binary files

serialize and deserialize ActionScript objects and classes to the file system

get system information on files and directories

In this blog post I'll talk about what new classes are available in Flex 3 (Flex "Moxie" M2 SDK to be specific) that make all this possible. In my next post I'll show an example of how to use the file system API in a real-world application.